The Midnight Band of Mercy

by Michael Blaine

Unfolding his stiff body, Max intercepted the gangly clergyman at the corner.

  “Max Greengrass from the Herald?”

  Waving down a cab, Weems refused to acknowledge his presence. Max grabbed the minister’s sleeve, but he shook the reporter off and hurled himself into the hack. Why was he running? Why wouldn’t he answer a few simple questions?

  Racing alongside the cab, Max fired off one question. “Your church owns a warehouse on Schermerhorn, doesn’t it?”

  In his self-made bubble, Weems gazed into space. Did he know what his cousin, Mrs. Edwards, had been doing all along? Wasn’t flight an admission of guilt?

  “I know about the insurance policies,” Max shouted as the vehicle picked up speed.

  Weems stared straight ahead, as if he hadn’t heard a thing. On the run, Max caught a glimpse of the minister’s grim face. Then a produce wagon practically knocked him down. Skidding and tilting on the uneven pavement, the cart bounced past him, a bushel of red potatoes cascading to his feet. Dodging the soft missiles, he tried to hail another cab.

  The first empty one, rolling in between the far curb and a flatbed piled high with lumber, rattled by out of reach. Another driver took a look at him waving frantically from the curb and snapped his reins, his gray gelding bolting forward.

  By the time Max secured another hack, Weems was bobbing along two blocks further downtown. Cutting into the streaming traffic, the cabby roused his nag with a slashing whip. Bearing down on them, the massive Sixth Avenue horsecar rumbled along its rails, but the cabby’s light carriage bounced across the tracks a foot ahead of the streetcar’s pounding team.

  Tentatively, Max opened his eyes. A lumbering coach rocked a bare six inches away.

  “Where to, mister?”

  “You on hop or what?” Weaving in between a furniture truck and a brass-fitted landau, Weems’s cab veered right onto Twentieth Street. “Next block, hang a right.”

  Twentieth became a wall of traffic. Max leaned out of his vehicle just in time to see Weems jump out. Hauling his stuffed bag, the churchman trotted toward Seventh Avenue, then disappeared around the corner. Max threw a coin at the hack and leaped out too, but by the time he reached Seventh Avenue, Weems had disappeared. A girl chalked boxes on the sidewalk. Nearby, her friends turned a rope and chanted. A raw construction site provided the main attraction, sidewalk engineers smoking and peering through the rough plank fence. Half-heartedly, Max jogged uptown toward Twenty-Third, just in case.

  Twenty yards in front of him, Weems materialized, kneeling, his carpetbag split at the seams. Helter-skelter, the minister was stuffing his linens back into the satchel. Max took a few more steps before the clergyman looked up. His eyes fixed on the reporter for a heartbeat, and then he took off, socks, underwear, starched shirts, and black clerical garments spilling out behind him.

  Several small boys swarmed over the bag’s strewn treasures. Weems had a deceptive, loping stride, and was running at a good clip. Max was losing ground, and then he almost bowled over a portly businessman. The sidewalk was choked with window shoppers, deliverymen, salesmen, liveried toadies, beggars, coachmen, and a circus of loose children. At the end of the block, the uptown Sixth Avenue blasted its steam whistle and pulled out of the elevated station.

  Max had to stop him. If Weems made that train, he could catch the Northern New York Railroad at 145th or disappear into the wilds of St. Nicholas Avenue. The engine’s roar slowly faded, but in a minute, though still invisible, another locomotive came chugging in. The downtown cars. Suspended two stories above, the fanciful Gothic station looked a mile high. Max took the covered pavilion stairs two at a time. When he reached the platform, he caught sight of Weems leaping onto the first car. Then the doors slid closed, and he heard the first burst of steam. Racing toward the end carriage, he saw a pair of young men on the last car’s rear platform urging him on.

  His legs were knotting up with cramps.

  The great iron wheels started rolling. He’d done it before, dozens of times. The gate was down. The train lumbered along the edge of the platform, slowly picking up speed. His heart in his throat, he timed his leap and vaulted aboard. Staggering, he grabbed a railing with his bandage-wrapped hand, the two sports righting him and pounding him on the back.

  “Almost fatal,” one young man laughed.

  “You shoulda seen what Carl here did last week on the Third Avenue. Suicidal.”

  Max peered into the rear carriage. Packed tight as a can of tinned fish. Weems was three cars ahead. He had to make a plan. He could leap out at the next station, race forward and jam himself into the next car. The conductor might close the doors in his face, though. It made more sense to hang off his current perch and scan the emerging hordes at every station. He could always take a flyer onto the platform if he saw Weems slipping away.

  The Jefferson Market Courthouse threw a shadow across the Eighth Street platform. At Amity Street a gaggle of factory girls tumbled out of the train. Weems was a head taller than the black-shawled Italian women passing by. He’d stick out like a sore thumb if he plunged off at this station. At Chambers, passengers poured out for the steamship lines and the Erie Railroad Ferry, but the minister wasn’t among them. He was still aboard. Either that or he had melted away earlier. Its wheels grating, the train jerked a block east past Printing House Square, the Post Office, and City Hall. At every stop Max tensed, ready to lunge through the doors, but Weems didn’t show.

  St. Paul’s Georgian spire sailed past as the Sixth Avenue thundered toward the tip of the island. Commercial blocks of brick and brownstone, the treetops of Battery Park all sped by two stories below. With every stop his spirits sank. Weems must have evaporated into the departing crowds, but Max had no choice. He had to hang on now until the end of the line.

  South Ferry station was a madhouse, a thousand voices rising and falling like breakers on the shore. Passengers from every El converged, switching lines, heading for the Staten Island Ferry or the sidewheeler to Coney. The great terminal stank of horseshit and brine and an underlying, sickly sweet aroma. Max elbowed his way off the Sixth Avenue and threw himself into the roiling mob. Turning round and round, he couldn’t see more than two feet in any direction. He jumped as high as he could, but couldn’t make out the clergyman in the dark masses of passengers coiling around him. Then he saw the iron girders.

  Fighting his exhaustion, he shinnied up several feet above the river of bobbing heads, derbies, homburgs, straw boaters, feathered hats, and shawls. Dark tributaries spilled out toward the Third and Ninth Avenue lines.

  Far downstream, Weems’s gaunt form shuffled along in the packed crowd.

  Ducking his head, the minister passed under the Third Avenue sign. Against the tide of Ninth Avenue riders Max josded his way, turning sideways, making himself small, shoving until he was swept up by the powerful counter-current of east side riders. Every few minutes trains rumbled in and out of the station.

  Near the Third Avenue line’s platform, the crowd thinned just enough, and he ran, weaving in and out of the slump-shouldered garment workers. Caps and shawls predominated now. The peacock feathers and birds of paradise had migrated to the west side trains. At the last moment he hurled himself into the middle carriage, forcing himself into a few square inches of space, but then the doors refused to close. A man with an inflamed face seemed to blame Max and tried to shove him back onto the platform, but the reporter put his head down, spread his legs for balance, and refused to budge. On the third attempt, the doors slid shut, and the train shuddered and jerked forward.

  He didn’t know where Weems was now, in the same packed car or up front behind the locomotive. At first the east side train ran on the narrow streets themselves. Water Street. Coentis Slip. Front Street and Old Slip. Irate passengers trapped in the center of the carriage called out their stops but remained ensnared in the dense core of bodies. In a jumble Max saw a sail puffed with wind, tenements, coffee and spice warehouses. Climbing a gentle grade, the steam engine dragged its human c
argo to the elevated tracks. At Fulton Street, too narrow to accommodate the usual iron stanchions, engineers had built the station right into the United States Hotel.

  A force boiling deep inside the carriage suddenly blew Max out onto the platform. Enraged riders already two or three stops past their destinations exploded from the car. The door to the hotel flew open. Disoriented, Max saw a brown-haired woman shaking a leather cup behind the check-in desk. A dice cup, he registered. A lobby jockey lobbed a gob of phlegm at a brass spittoon. Twenty feet down the platform the Reverend Weems, also flung out, gazed around, goggle-eyed. Quickly recovering his senses, the clergyman ducked his head and headed for the hotel.

  In bad sack suits, several drummers clustered around the front desk, betting on the next roll. A murky painting of the Hudson, the river little more than a brown stain, dominated the room. A worn couch and a few chairs huddled around a colorless rug. Weems stalked toward the desk, unaware that Max was at his heels.

  “Eight’s the play,” a slack-spined salesman called out.

  “Bets, gentlemen,” the brunette called out. Traces of former beauty marked her lined features. A sprinkling of cornstarch on her throat didn’t quite hide a rash.

  Weems forced his way between the players. “May I pay for a room?”

  The bones clicked across the desk. Three and three.

  Blood pounding in his temples, Max lunged and grabbed Weems’s elbow. “You got a house dick, lady?”

  “You registered?”

  “This man’s assaulting me,” Weems said in an even tone, jerking his arm out of Max’s grasp.

  “He’s behind that fire on Schermerhorn today. Call the cops, the fire department, something, come on,” Max urged the brunette.

  At the mention of arson, Weems’s hawk-nosed face drained of color. His tic of a smile quivered, a muscle spasm in the corner of his mouth. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his stringy neck. Suddenly he bounded toward the door. Max snatched at him but caught nothing but air. By the time he burst outside again, Weems was craning his neck at the end of the platform. Max threw everything into his last dash, his short, choppy strides propelling him forward.

  A small shape in the distance, a Forney blasted its high-pitched whistle.

  Max caught up with Weems as the train thundered toward the station. Lowering his shoulder, he knocked the minister against a girder. Whippet-thin, Weems went flying, but he caught his balance at the last moment. Dodging Max’s grasp, he tried to scuttle back down the platform, but Max cut him off. If only the sonofabitch would stay still for a minute. The man was all arms and legs. Retreating, Weems escaped a second time, but his ankles seemed to tangle and all at once he was teetering on the platform’s lip, an expression of horror on his bony face.

  There was plenty of time. Weems’s spine arched back, his head went in the other direction, his spastic arms sawing air. All Max had to do was reach out, loop his arm around the minister’s waist, and reel him in to safety. Hooking one arm around a nearby girder would anchor him. … The split second lasted forever. Weems’s face turned to fish flesh, his jaw went slack, his stringy neck stretched to the snapping point. He gave Max a beseeching look. In the compressed moment, Max gazed, mesmerized, as the clergyman’s disbelief turned to white-eyed terror.

  Max heard the train’s roar in his ears. He tasted the dead fire’s ashes on his tongue. There was a trench in a warehouse basement.… What about the others?

  Flailing, Weems flopped backward and down to the track bed, his skull striking a rail, the sound of the blow blotted out by the approaching uproar. Now the steam engine tore through space, growing enormous, its ear-splitting whistle blowing over and over, its iron wheels locked and skidding, throwing up sparks. The screech of metal on metal became unbearable. The maroon cars blurred past, bucked, then ground to a stop.

  The Forney’s stack was pointing at a crazy angle. Max’s stunned eye traced the outlines of the spark arrester first, moved to the tilted cab and then further down to the string of cars, bunched and thrown from the tracks. Then his gaze drifted back to the polished locomotive. Beneath its wheels a bloody clump of hair and a white, wormy substance.

  He hadn’t shoved the man. He’d been perfectly neutral. No one could accuse him of a thing. But he knew what he had done by doing nothing at all.

  Slowly the upended cars bled their dazed passengers. A stout man in a celluloid collar emerged blinking, a faraway look in his eyes. Hand on her wide-brimmed hat, a young woman lifted herself through the door and scrambled up to the platform. A long-necked, stately broker held his arm out to a matron and led her to a service ladder. Picking his way down the line, the engineer paused and squatted, shaking his head as he examined the wreckage.

  Then he came upon the crushed man, and he let out a groan. Max had to turn away.

  Curses ripped the air. A flagman raced down the tracks to head off further disaster.

  Murder by omission. Drifting in another world, Max wondered if there was such a thing.

  The self-accusation was absurd, wasn’t it? It had been an accident. Weems had fallen fleeing a simple interview. If he wasn’t guilty as sin, why had he run away like a criminal? There had only been a split second to reach out. Anyway, suppose he had gotten a grip on the flailing minister? He might have been dragged down and mashed under the Forney’s wheels himself. It had all happened in a blur. How could an act of self-preservation become its mirror image?

  Unfortunately, his other mind saw it quite differently. Hadn’t there been all the time in the world? A hundred thoughts had flashed through his brain between the premonition and Weems’s dying fall. The minister was a light, gawky creature. Bracing himself on that girder, he could have righted the staggering man and kept himself perfectly safe. When he had refused to reach out, he wasn’t saving himself, he was choosing to let Weems tumble to the tracks. His paralysis was really an act of revenge.

  And so what? Who would know? He would know. He would remember. In the nightmares he knew were coming, he would be the one losing his balance, fluttering and plunging under the grinding wheels. Inside these dreams, he would reason with himself, he would recall that he was alive, but it would do no good. In his dream-life, logic was a paltry force.

  An automaton, he groped for his pencil. His warring thoughts deadlocked, cunning took over. Who would shape what had happened? Who would create cause-and-effect where there had been none? The body on the roadbed deserved attention, but was it more than a sidebar? Had Weems tripped over his own feet? Or thrown himself in the steam engine’s path in despair? Who could tell?

  “A terrible accident on the El road … train derailed … a fatality.” The inked keys struck paper. The platen gripped. The barrel turned. The dry description had practically composed itself.

  Had he made indecision an act of retribution? He couldn’t quite recall. In that endless instant, so many thoughts had flooded his mind. How could he feel such self-loathing and indifference simultaneously? Because he had killed the right man for the wrong reason? Killed? Ridiculous. An oversight, muscle failure, a miscalculation, a natural impulse to survive.

  Yet he couldn’t shake the sensation that he had made a decision before reason entered into it. Then it was out of his hands, wasn’t it? To the outside world, the affair was cut and dried. In five grafs he’d fixed Weems’s fate. You could read all about it in tomorrow’s edition.

  From Printing House Square he caught a cab to Mulberry Street. Across from the yellowed marble station, three reporters on a stoop suspended their card game, eyeing him as he bounded into the inner sanctum. Leaving half a dozen petitioners waiting, the secretary husded him into the police superintendent’s office. Without a word Max slid Mrs. Edwards’s ledger across Byrnes’s desk.

  “What’ve we got here?” The detective riffled the pages.

  “The addresses of all the church property. I marked the baby farms I found already. There have to be others. Policy numbers are in the back.” All his energy was rushing back. And Leon was ens
conced safely on Carmine Street, learning the pleasures of pasta. There was a still place, for once, in Max’s restless mind.

  Byrnes nipped through page after page, whistling under his breath. “My investigators came up with this when they searched the lady’s premises, didn’t they, boyo?”

  “Sure. Nice job. Did you pick them up yet?”

  “We nabbed the two women last night. Don’t worry, they’re spilling. You know the fella did the swan dive?” Byrnes asked.

  “MacNamara?”

  “Hudson Duster. Right in line for the crown after Dinny Watson.”

  “Royalty?”

  “Oh, yeah. We’ve got him in our picture gallery.” Byrnes drew a print from his drawer. The stark likeness of Stephenson’s long-jawed rag. “For your picture artist.” Leaning forward, intimate as a pal at a long polished bar, he gave up a choice tidbit. “The Dusters’re moving into legit stuff fast.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Byrnes cracked his knuckles and lit his dead cigar. Who knew better than the great detective? The superintendent had invented the picture gallery, his web of informers extended from Jay Gould’s banking house to Battle Alley. It was hard to fight the undertow of Byrnes’s good will, but where was the Reverend Weems in this equation? Or Holy Trinity?

  “Are you saying these ladies took their marching orders from MacNamara? That’s a little hard to swallow.”

  Dark lines radiated down from the police chief’s brow. His black eyes narrowed to slits, his glare striking Max with the force of a blow. More than one man had withered under this fierce expression, but Max knew all the elements of the performance. Leon was still alive. He felt an unreasonable peace.

  Radiating confidence, Byrnes launched into his argument. “Why not? You think these gangs are a bunch of dumb brutes? The public has the idea they just pinch goods off the docks, but they’ve got curb brokers in their pockets, too. After-hours trades, penny stocks, that sort of thing,” he added for good measure.

  “I don’t know. The Dusters and a bunch of society quiffs? They were paid off as muscle is my guess. They’re not running the scam themselves.”